1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a method and devices for the location-dependent provision and/or reproduction of information to a user.
2. Description of the Related Art
Systems for location-dependent information reproduction are known in the art and are employed, for example, in the area of museums for automatic tours through the museum. The information units to be reproduced describe various objects located at different locations. The systems have knowledge of the user location and of the locations of the information units. The selection of the information unit to be reproduced from the plurality of information units is performed via so-called selection criteria. These selection criteria include, among other things, geographic selection criteria and determine, for example, in which distance to the user an object may maximally be situated for the corresponding information unit to be included in the short list of information units to be selected, one of which, in turn, is finally to be reproduced. Each geographic selection criterion, such as the maximum distance of an object to the user, is designed for the specific application of the system, such as in the case of the museum visitor tour system for the corresponding conditions applying to a visit to a museum.
Current systems of the type described above fail when it is attempted to employ them in applications in which there are environmental and situational conditions that change and/or vary considerably, because in situations and/or environments for which they are not designed, they lead to a rather useless selection of information units to be reproduced. When the museum guide described above is employed in an outdoor museum, for example, in which the visitors walk both through exhibition rooms and along outdoor paths, the configuration of the geographic selection parameters to one of the two environments and/or situations, that is outdoors or indoors, leads to a rather useless selection in the respective other environment.
An example for a system of the type described above is described, for example, in DE 10039663 A1.
Accordingly, there is a need for systems for location-dependent information reproduction that may be employed universally and, in addition, lead to a more efficient selection of the information units to be reproduced.
DE 19841169 C1 describes a method and a device for the provision of informational data in connection with a GPS system. The informational data in a data carrier are reproduced depending on the current location data and the current movement speed data via an optical and/or acoustic output unit. More specifically, the selection of the information file to be reproduced from the provided information files is based on finding out first the relevant informational data for a certain distance ahead and then replaying them in the order that the next informational data to be replayed is the one which may be replayed at top priority in the time window until the forecast end point of its validity for the route. Accordingly, a sequential application of fixed selection criteria is used for the selection of information to be reproduced. First, a selection criterion is applied which, from all information, only selects those describing the objects that are relevant for a forecast path ahead and/or can be reproduced along a certain route segment. From this information, in turn, those with top priority are filtered out, wherein it is taken into account, however, that the user is going with a detected speed and that, therefore, the route segments concerned by the information are traveled through for different periods of time depending on speed, so that only that information is replayed that is sufficiently short with respect to its replay duration.
DE 69310938 T2 describes a system with electronic verbal tourist instructions. The system allows searching for information on database with respect to the immediate environment of a selected or determined position, and passing it on to the user, namely on request or automatically. On the one hand, upon request for information by the user, the system is capable of displaying suitable answers with respect to the respective vicinity with increasing magnitude of distance and/or listing them verbally. According to another mode of operation of the system, the information output to the user is performed automatically, thereby allowing the user to know the information hierarchically classified as the most important or most interesting one of the location where the system is located in the database. The objects described in the database have their precise locations in their description for location-dependent reproduction. Moreover, the information is stored such that a decision of access is permitted according to the degree of accuracy desired for the information.